Appeared as: Schultheiss, O. C., & Brunstein, J. C. (2010 ...
Transcript of Appeared as: Schultheiss, O. C., & Brunstein, J. C. (2010 ...
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Appeared as: Schultheiss, O. C., & Brunstein, J. C. (2010). Introduction. In O. C.
Schultheiss & J. C. Brunstein (Eds.), Implicit motives (pp. ix-xxvii). New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Introduction
This volume continues a loose series of edited books (Atkinson, 1958; Smith,
1992) dedicated to the examination of human motivation and behavior through the lens of
implicit motives, enduring nonconscious needs that drive humans‘ behavior toward the
attainment of specific classes of incentives. In the following, we will sketch out a brief
history of research on implicit motives, portray the basic principles guiding implicit
motive research, and provide an overview of the chapters featured in this book.
The Excitement of the Early Years: 1948 to 1961
Research on implicit motives started when in the late 1940s David McClelland,
who was then a new faculty member at Wesleyan University, teamed up with graduate
student John Atkinson to measure motivational needs in humans. They decided to start
with hunger motivation as a model need system but did not want to rely on people‘s
introspective reports of hunger because they doubted the validity of such self-reports.
McClelland (1984) later traced his doubts about self-report to his observations as a young
man who noted the striking difference between the values people avowed to in church on
Sundays and their actual behavior throughout the rest of the week. ―I never put much
faith in what people say their values are on questionnaires, because I don‘t believe that
these statements bear very much relationship to what they in fact do or even to the values
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that implicitly guide their lives. This also gave me a strong belief in the reality of
unconscious values or motives, which were obviously affecting what they did in ways
that were quite unknown to themselves‖ (p. 4, italics in original).
McClelland and Atkinson were looking for a way to assess the need for food that
bypassed research participants‘ introspective reports on how hungry they felt. According
to Atkinson (in Winter, 1998), the decision to measure hunger motivation with a variant
of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), Morgan and Murray‘s (1935) device to tap
into unconscious needs, was due to a lucky coincidence: ―We were talking about this first
experiment in Dave‘s office. Bob Knapp walked from one side to the other and he said,
‗Why don‘t you try the TAT?‘, and then walked out the door.‖ (Winter, 1998, p.139)
The decision to use the TAT was due to serendipity; the rest is history.
McClelland and Atkinson‘s original work on the effects of food deprivation on TAT
story content was extremely promising (Atkinson & McClelland, 1948). Individuals who
had fasted for 16 hours wrote stories about pictures suggestive of food that dealt with the
procurement of food and with deprivation states; individuals who had just had breakfast
did not imbue their stories with this kind of imagery. Thus, Atkinson and McClelland had
used an experimental manipulation of a motivational need (food deprivation versus no
deprivation) and studied its effect on the themes research participants wrote about in their
stories. In later research, the themes identified in experimental motive arousal studies of
this kind were codified and used to assess individual differences in motivational needs in
individuals who had been tested under neutral conditions. This was based on the
assumption that individuals who showed a lot of motive imagery in their stories in the
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absence of situational motive arousal must be chronically high in this motivational need
whereas individuals with little motive imagery are not.
Despite the initial success with identifying imagery differences in stories written
by hungry and full research participants, hunger as a motivational need was soon
abandoned in favor of the need to achieve because it was felt that this need was more
relevant for individuals‘ success in specific jobs and life in general. Within only a
handful of years, McClelland, Atkinson, and their collaborators conducted ground-
breaking research on the assessment of the need for achievement (or n Achievement, as it
was named to adhere to Murray‘s, 1938, original terminology). The harvest of this
research was published as The Achievement Motive (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, &
Lowell, 1953), a book that remains highly readable and thought stimulating to this day
and contains many ideas and findings whose implications still await thorough study.
The years after the publication of The Achievement Motive saw a rapid
proliferation of the measurement approach to motivation introduced by McClelland and
Atkinson. Enthusiasm for the new motivational concepts and measurement approach
quickly spread beyond the confines of Harvard University, where David McClelland
received an appointment in the early 1950s, and the University of Michigan, where John
Atkinson continued his work after graduating from Wesleyan. In quick succession, TAT-
based measures of other motivational needs were developed, such as the needs for power,
affiliation, and sex, and validated in studies on task performance, perception, attitudes,
developmental processes, and other validity criteria. Researchers also dedicated
considerable effort to understanding the picture story coding methods used for the
assessment of motives. Many of these studies were published or reprinted in the first
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edited volume dedicated solely to theory and research dealing with implicit motives,
Atkinson‘s (1958) Motives in Fantasy, Action, and Society.
The early years also portended what would come to be a hallmark of implicit
motive research, namely the application of motivational measures and concepts beyond
the confines of psychological science. Soon after the initial work on the assessment and
validation of the need for achievement was completed, McClelland started to explore the
usefulness of this motive for the explanation of economic phenomena and their cultural
precursors. These ideas were formulated for the first time in a contribution to the
Nebraska Symposium on Motivation series (McClelland, 1955) and culminated in the
publication of The Achieving Society (McClelland, 1961), an exciting intellectual tour-de-
force through history, mythology, religion, sociology, and particularly economics. In the
book, McClelland linked Protestant values to child-rearing practices that fostered high
achievement motivation and, as a consequence, entrepreneurial activity. He also
demonstrated for several different countries and historical eras that periods of increases in
collective achievement motivation preceded periods of economic growth. The Achieving
Society represents the crowning accomplishment of the field‘s early years, pushing the
boundaries of what motivational science (and psychology more generally) can be applied
to and account for, and showcasing the impressive validity and predictive power of
content-coding methods for the assessment of motivational needs.
Consolidation, Confusion, and Conflict: 1961 to 1989
For roughly the next three decades, work on implicit motives branched out
further, first continuing to gain interest among researchers, but then slipping into
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stagnation in the later years. The factors that contributed to its initially increasing
popularity included Atkinson‘s development of a rigorous and highly influential theory of
achievement motivation that was originally published in 1957 but had its main impact on
psychology and other social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. Atkinson later took
theorizing a big step further by developing, with David Birch, the dynamics of action
theory (Atkinson & Birch, 1970), a highly advanced and complex account of the laws
governing the ebb and flow of motivation and the change from one activity to the next.
Meanwhile, McClelland and his associates intensified their efforts to apply motivational
concepts to real-world phenomena in business settings and economic development. One
such effort was the attempt to train small business owners in an entire Indian town to
think and act like a person high in the need for achievement and thereby to improve the
local economy (McClelland & Winter, 1971). Another success story of the second phase
in the field‘s history was the emerging realization that implicit motives were associated
with specific psychophysiological responses and health outcomes. Steele (1973), in his
pioneering dissertation, was able to document a link between aroused power motivation
and excretion of sympathetic catecholamines, as measured in urine levels. With a time
lag of 10 years, this discovery led to an intensive and productive exploration of the role
of implicit motives in health and disease and the physiological mechanisms involved in it
(for a summary, see McClelland, 1989).
Despite these successes, the enthusiasm of the early years started to wear off, an
effect that is, perhaps, inevitable in any line of research whose early promise of boundless
validity and applicability finally has to give way to a realistic acknowledgment of the
boundaries of its concepts and the limitations of its measures. But work on implicit
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motives also came under fire from critics (e.g., Entwisle, 1972; Fineman, 1977; Klinger,
1971), and the leading researchers of the field took an amazingly long time to muster
convincing rebuttals to the inappropriate criticisms and to learn from the appropriate
ones.
It is ironic and also tragic that the very principle on which implicit motive
research is built—that people cannot validly report on their motivational needs, and
therefore, indirect assessment methods have to be employed—was ignored by many
researchers at the fringes of the field, some of whom then complained that measures of
implicit motives did not correlate with self-report measures and did not predict the same
outcomes as these self-report measures (e.g., Entwisle, 1972; Fineman, 1977). Others
simply developed self-report measures for the motivational needs studied by implicit
motive researchers and declared these new assessment tools to be able to tap the same
constructs as the more time-consuming picture story content-coding motive measures. As
a consequence, scores of questionnaire measures of the ―achievement motive‖ and other
motivational needs have been developed and established under the same construct name
as measures of implicit needs, and entire theories have been built on findings obtained
with them, despite the fact that these questionnaire measures do not substantially
correlate with implicit motive measures. A novice entering the field of human motivation
today is faced with the daunting task of figuring out that self-report and indirect measures
of presumably the same motive do not measure the same thing or predict the same kinds
of outcomes, despite having the same construct name. McClelland, Koestner, and
Weinberger (1989) later commented on this state of affairs: ―Another way to react to this
lack of correlation is to take it seriously, to insist that at a minimum, psychologists should
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not call by the same name two measures that do not correlate with one another [...].‖ (p.
691).
To some extent, however, this state of affairs was also a homemade problem,
reflecting a lack of careful theorizing in the field of implicit motives itself, theorizing that
was commensurate with basic assumptions and research findings. True, Atkinson (1957)
had developed the influential risk-taking theory of achievement motivation. But in doing
so, he abandoned a basic assumption of his earlier work—that motivational needs operate
unconsciously—and integrated a self-report measure of fear of failure into his research
and theorizing, thereby perhaps giving others the impression that questionnaires can be
used, after all, to validly assess motivational needs. Atkinson‘s later work on the
dynamics of action, although developed in part to account for the lacking internal
consistency of implicit motive measures, ranged far beyond the domain of the empirical
data—too far, perhaps, to provide a useful conceptual framework for predicting, testing,
and interpreting effects of implicit motives empirically. McClelland, on the other hand,
had witnessed the rise and fall of Clark Hull‘s general theory of behavior while he was a
graduate student at Yale University and therefore was ambivalent about the usefulness of
theories: ―My primary loyalty is to the phenomenon, to the empirical fact—and if it
messes up somebody‘s theory, so much the worse for the theory‖ (McClelland, 1984, p.
28, italics in original).
What was missing at the very core of implicit motive research was an explicit
recognition that it is not sufficient to postulate that people have no insight into their
motivational needs and then prove the point by showing that self-report measures of
motivation do not correlate with implicit motive measures. That only leads to the
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question: If they are not correlated, which is better at predicting relevant criteria? The
issue of statistical independence then becomes an issue of competing validity, and only
one type of construct can win the race. What needs to be added to the independence of
the predictors is, at a minimum, a conceptual and empirical specification of which kinds
of outcomes are affected by each type of measure.
A study by deCharms, Morrison, Reitman, and McClelland (1955) provided the
clues necessary to arrive at such a model. The researchers assessed participants‘ implicit
achievement motive and also the value they explicitly placed on achievement. Then they
had them work on a classic validity correlate of the implicit motive (an anagram task) and
on a task that required them to ascribe achievement-related traits to a target person. The
implicit achievement motive predicted performance on the anagram task, but not the
traits participants ascribed to the target. In contrast, the degree to which participants rated
achievement as something valuable predicted their trait ascriptions, but not their anagram
task performance. What this study suggested, then, was that implicit motivational needs
predict behavioral performance and that self-attributed motives predict verbal choices and
attitudes.
Either this set of findings was so perfectly compatible with McClelland‘s and his
colleagues‘ way of thinking about conscious and unconscious levels of motivation that
they did not fully realize its significance for a person unfamiliar with their views on
motivation (i.e., someone outside of the field of implicit motives), or they failed to grasp
that they had just identified a rift between levels of behavior that was much more general
and pervasive than the mere dissociation of the predictor measures of implicit and self-
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attributed motivation. Whatever the reason, McClelland and his associates never made
much of these findings for the next 25 years.
But in light of waxing criticism of implicit motive measures and waning interest
in implicit motive research, McClelland finally realized that something more was needed
than an insistence on the validity of the implicit motive measure. After all, as long as
implicit and self-attributed motives were in competition with each other and one was
presented as a valid measure, where, exactly, did that leave the other?
McClelland (1980) provided the first grudging acknowledgement that self-reports
of motivation might also have some validity, but in a different domain of behavior than
implicit motives. Using data from studies on academic and life success, early
socialization, and other validity correlates, he showed that implicit motives and self-
attributed needs (which he termed ―values‖) predicted different kinds of behavior:
implicit motives, long-term behavioral trends in unstructured situations; and self-
attributed motives, short-term behavior on questionnaires and in response to specific,
clear-cut situational demands. At the same time, he questioned the evidence proponents
of self-report measures of motivation cited for the reliability and validity of their
constructs. In particular, he denied that self-report measures of motivation assessed
anything motivational at all. Although many of his arguments against self-report
measures of motivation were incisive and still deserve careful consideration and a
principled response by anyone who considers using self-report measures of motivation,
this half-hearted concession did not yet resolve the antagonism that the field of implicit
motive research had developed with the rest of personality psychology, then a notoriously
self-report-prone field of research.
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Conceptual Refinement and Reinvigoration: 1989 until Now
During the 1980s, McClelland kept working on a way to integrate conscious and
nonconscious forms of motivation into a coherent account of motivated behavior
(McClelland, 1985, 1987). Meanwhile, the rest of psychology caught up with implicit
motive research. Cognitive psychology, which for a long time had put its trust in
common-coding models of information processing, started to realize that information that
is processed consciously takes a different route and has different properties than
information that is processed outside of consciousness (e.g., Squire, 1986). Concepts like
implicit perception, implicit memory, and implicit learning started to become popular,
and the paradigms to test and separate them from explicit forms of cognition were
developed (Kihlstrom, 1990). Social psychologists began to realize that attitudes can be
processed and represented implicitly, outside of conscious awareness, and can dissociate
from explicit, conscious attitudes (e.g., Devine, 1989). Neuropsychologists had known at
least since the 1950s that the brain has several dissociable systems for perceiving,
processing, and storing information, only some of which are involved in conscious
memory and control of behavior (e.g., Corkin, 1968). In short, psychology collectively
realized that the human psyche operates on more than one level, and that this can be
robustly demonstrated across many different mental functions (Kihlstrom, 1990).
So the time was ripe when in 1989, McClelland, Koestner, and Weinberger
published a seminal paper, ―How do self-attributed and implicit motives differ?,‖ in
Psychological Review. In this article, they proposed that implicit motives respond to task-
intrinsic incentives and influence operant behaviors (i.e., behavior in unstructured
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situations), whereas self-attributed (or explicit) motives respond to social incentives and
influence respondent behaviors (i.e., behaviors in response to a specific social demand or
expectation). Besides formulating for the first time a comprehensive, conceptually
symmetric model for conscious and nonconscious levels of motivational control over
behavior, McClelland et al. also introduced new terms for existing measures and
constructs that have been adopted by most researchers in this field since then. For one,
they coined the term implicit motive in analogy to Schachter‘s (1987) implicit memory
concept to denote nonconscious motivational needs assessed through indirect means and
contrasted it with the term explicit motive, which denoted the motivational needs and
strivings that people consciously ascribe to themselves. A second change in terminology
was the switch from TAT to Picture Story Exercise (PSE) as the official name for the
picture story methods commonly used to assess implicit motives. The change reflects the
fact that motive researchers have rarely used Murray‘s (1943) original TAT stimuli or the
administration procedures associated with it. Instead, they frequently used pictures
coming from other sources, administered the test in group settings in which participants
would write their stories under timed conditions instead of having them tell their stories
to an interviewer, and they used empirically derived content-coding systems for scoring
the stories instead of coding systems developed based on psychodynamic theories or
clinicians‘ consensus (Winter, 1999).
A meta-analysis by Spangler (1992) soon corroborated the fundamental validity
of McClelland et al.‘s (1989) two-systems model. Spangler found that across hundreds of
studies, the implicit achievement motive was indeed a powerful predictor of operant
behaviors, particularly if suitable task incentives were present, but not of respondent
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behaviors, and that the reverse was true of the explicit achievement motive. These
findings and McClelland et al.‘s (1989) detailed model of motivation went a long way
toward reconciling implicit motive research with the mainstream of personality
psychology and convincing a new generation of researchers that the implicit motive
construct was worth investigating.
This development was further facilitated by the publication of a second edited
volume dedicated to the theory and assessment of implicit motives and related constructs,
Smith‘s (1992) Motivation And Personality: Handbook of Thematic Content Analysis.
The book featured, besides new and reprinted chapters on conceptual issues related to
implicit motive measurement and validity, coding manuals for classic, revised, and new
measures of implicit motives as well as cognitive styles that are expressed in people‘s
storytelling. It also contains chapters summarizing the validation of each coding system
and, in the appendix, training materials for the acquisition of coding skills in all of the
featured systems. Together with Atkinson (1958), this book represents an authoritative
and comprehensive source for the reader who is interested in learning how to code text
for motivational imagery.
Perhaps a third, albeit less visible, promoter of the rejuvenated interest in implicit
motives was the fact that since the 1970s, David Winter had developed an integrated
coding system for the assessment of motivational imagery in political speeches and
historical documents (Winter, 1991). This running text system allows researchers to code
achievement, power, and affiliation imagery in one run, using simplified coding rules.
Although developed for other purposes than for use with the PSE, many researchers have
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started using Winter‘s running text system for coding PSE stories due to its efficiency
and comprehensiveness.
So after a time of stagnation, research on implicit motives was off to a fresh start,
benefitting from the fact that the zeitgeist in academic psychology had finally caught up
with its basic assumptions, from new and better models, and a greater and more refined
choice of coding systems. A factor that has also started to play into the rapidly increasing
sophistication of implicit motive research is the fact that cognitive psychology has
developed models and instruments that now help motive researchers tease apart the
domains and boundaries of influence of implicit and explicit motives on a variety of
processes, such as attention, learning, and memory. And biopsychological approaches to
motivation, with their conceptual rigor and precision, hold particular promise for
understanding the neurobiological foundations of implicit motives and the behaviors
affected by them (Berridge, 2004; LeDoux, 2002). So perhaps it is not too much to hope
for if we predict that after decades of relative separation from the mainstream of
psychological research, the implicit motive construct will become a useful ingredient of
affective neuroscience approaches to explaining behavior, one of the most rapidly
growing disciplines of psychology.
We will not go into much detail about the specific developments in motive
research after 1989; these are described at length in the many excellent chapters
contained in this book. Instead, as a measure of the resurgence of interest in implicit
motive research, we would like to note that implicit motives are featured at length in
several popular textbooks of personality psychology (Carver & Scheier, 2007; Larsen &
Buss, 2008; McAdams, 2009; Winter, 1996), many of which are enjoying widespread use
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in undergraduate courses and are frequently updated in new editions. The Handbook of
Personality (John, Robins, & Pervin, 2008), a defining resource for the field of
personality psychology and the training of graduate students, now features in its third
edition a chapter on implicit motives for the first time (Schultheiss, 2008). Its companion
Handbook of Research Methods in Personality Psychology (Robins, Fraley, & Krueger,
2007) contains a chapter dedicated to implicit motive assessment (Schultheiss & Pang,
2007). Thus, the implicit motive construct enjoys continued as well as newfound
popularity among personality psychologists and also in other disciplines, and we are
confident that its impact will continue to increase as more researchers start using in their
own work the conceptual and methodological tools developed by motive researchers. The
purpose of this book is to document the more recent developments in implicit motive
research and to be a resource for colleagues who would like to familiarize themselves
with established and emergent theories and measurement approaches in the field.
Common Principles of Implicit Motive Research
Research in the field of implicit motives is defined by a set of common principles and
assumptions about what implicit motives are, how they can be assessed, and how they
operate. We have already mentioned some of them above; nevertheless, we think it is
helpful to be absolutely clear about the assumptions guiding the study of implicit motives
because they often are not made fully explicit in the work. Assumptions are fundamental,
broad hypotheses underlying the actual, narrow hypotheses and the way they are tested.
As such, they might be wrong (slightly or wholly) and not only for the sake of
falsifiability, but also for rational and principled development of models and theories,
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they need to be spelled out. So here are, in brief, the common principles guiding most of
the work presented by the contributors to this volume:
1. Implicit Motives Are Nonconscious and Cannot Be Measured through Self-Report.
As we have pointed out previously, this assumption has guided the field from the very
beginning and has also been supported in numerous studies that have examined the
correlation between the motivational needs that individuals attribute to themselves and
PSE measures of the same motivational needs. Across studies and motive domains, the
correlation is close to 0. This is even the case when the explicit measure is made as
similar as possible to the implicit measure, as Schultheiss, Yankova, Dirlikov, and Schad
(2009) have recently demonstrated.
2. Situational Arousal of a Motivational Need Is Associated with Characteristic
Changes in Thought Content and Other Nondeclarative Markers of Motivation. This was
Atkinson and McClelland‘s (1948) fundamental insight and idea: We may not know how
a motive is manifested in behavior, but we can find a way to arouse it and then examine
how thought content as manifested in picture stories changes as a function of the arousal.
Virtually all motive measures were derived following this basic principle or at least
validated through their convergence with measures developed in this way. There can be
considerable variation in the type of situational arousal, ranging from food deprivation
(Atkinson & McClelland, 1948) to subliminal tachistoscopic priming with brief sentences
(Siegel & Weinberger, 1998). Although most studies so far have used changes in
imaginative stories written after the situational arousal had taken place, and thought
content may be a good place to start looking for arousal-induced changes, there is no a
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priori reason why this approach could not also be extended to other markers of aroused
motivational states.
3. Motives Represent Capacities for Specific Affective Experiences; They Orient,
Select, and Energize Behavior. Starting with McClelland et al.‘s (1953) work, motive
researchers have conceived of motives as dispositions to seek out certain incentives for
the affective changes they elicit. Because a person with a strong motive is a person who
has a strong affective response to an incentive, the person orients attention toward cues
predicting the possibility of such an affective experience, selects through learning
predictive cues and instrumental behaviors that will allow approach toward and
attainment of the incentive, and executes such behaviors with increased vigor and energy.
These properties represent the hallmarks of motivation in studies with animals and
humans alike (Berridge, 2004; McClelland, 1987; Schultheiss, 2008).
4. Motives Interact with Situational Incentives to Shape Behavior. This
interactional view of motivation is part and parcel of classic and modern theories of
motivation (e.g., Lewin, 1935; Toates, 1986) and has been a fundamental assumption of
implicit motive research from the very beginning. For example, in the domain of
achievement motivation, one and the same situational incentive (e.g., a task of moderate
difficulty) may elicit dramatically different responses (e.g., an increase or a decrease in
effort expenditure) depending on the strength of an individual‘s implicit motive to
achieve. Conversely, the behavioral effects of implicit motives can markedly differ when
critical situational features are varied in laboratory settings or real-life situations. For
instance, the implicit achievement motive predicts response latencies on a mental
concentration task when participants receive feedback that their performance deteriorates
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but not when the feedback indicates that that they are doing well (Brunstein & Maier,
2005). Motive researchers generally adhere to Lewin‘s (1935) view that behavior might
best be understood as the product of person and situation variables and thus seek to
elucidate how implicit motives interact with environmental cues to generate meaningful
patterns of behavior both within and across situations.
5. Motives Have Pervasive Effects across Several Levels of Psychological
Functioning. Because early researchers—McClelland in particular—kept pushing the
envelope with regard to how far the influence of implicit motive reaches, we now know
that motives can have detectable effects at many levels: in the biological basement of
brain and body; at the first-floor level of individuals‘ cognitive, affective, and behavioral
functioning; and all the way up to the attic of societal, historic, and economic
phenomena—a pretty breathtaking span of validity for a construct! But perhaps this span
is not surprising because motives can be viewed as individual manifestations and
elaborations of fundamental systems that have guided the behavior of our species in
phylogenetic timespans (including historic time) and in many different environments and
situations. They are bound to have marked effects on behavior at all levels.
6. There Is a Limited Number of Implicit Motives. Power, affiliation, and
achievement, the motives this volume focuses on, are not the only basic motivational
needs, and others, such as hunger or sex, also deserve more attention in research.
However, the list of potential motives is not endless and in all likelihood limited to the
small number of phylogenetically evolved motivational systems biopsychologists have
described in some detail now (see, for instance, Panksepp, 1998).
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Overview of the Book
The book is divided into four parts. The first part, titled ―Motive Systems,‖
provides an overview of past and current research and theorizing on the ―Big Three‖ of
motivation research, the needs for power, achievement, and affiliation. In Chapter 1,
Fodor portrays the power motive as an ambivalent force behind human behavior:
sometimes beneficial, such as when power motivation fuels creativity; sometimes
detrimental, such as when power-motivated individuals become stressed by dominance
challenges or elicit ingratiating behavior in members of their work teams. Pang, in
Chapter 2, chronicles the metamorphoses of the achievement motive, from its beginnings
in The Achievement Motive (McClelland et al., 1953) and Atkinson‘s (1957) influential
risk-taking theory, to the work of Heinz Heckhausen (1963) in Germany who dissected
the motive into a hope of success and a fear of failure component, all the way to the latest
rigorous research efforts to identify the correlates of achievement hope and fear in the
thoughts and behaviors of research participants. Weinberger, Cotler, and Fishman
chronicle and discuss the measurement and validity of the affiliation motive in Chapter 3.
Like the achievement motive, the affiliation motive consists of hope and fear components
with different validity correlates: a capacity for closeness and love, also called intimacy
motivation, and a fear of rejection and loneliness, captured to a large extent in classical
measures of affiliation motivation. As Weinberger, Cotler, and Fishman point out, this
distinction deserves greater attention in future measurement and theorizing about the
motivational need to affiliate. Langens‘s chapter on activity inhibition concludes the
section on motive systems. Activity inhibition does not represent an implicit motive in its
own right, but it has been identified as an important implicit measure of self-regulation
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that frequently influences the expression of motives in behavior. Because it was derived
atheoretically, as a lucky finding in one of the first attempts to aid language analysis
through the use of the computer in the 1960s, its impact on the behavioral expression of
power and affiliation motivation was long regarded as a slight embarrassment by scholars
in the field. The situation has rapidly changed in recent years, however, because
researchers have started to study activity inhibition in its own right and have gained
important insights into the properties and functions of this construct. The fascinating
findings from this research, to which Langens has made key contributions, are
summarized in Chapter 4.
The second section of this book is titled ―Assessment of Implicit Motives,‖ and
the chapters in it deal with various overarching issues in motive assessment. In Chapter 5,
Pang gives a state-of-the-art account of the craft of motive assessment based on content
coding of picture stories. Her contribution provides excellent guidance for all the major
decisions that have to be made and issues that need to be considered if a researcher wants
to employ implicit motive measures: which and how many pictures to select, whether to
pretest pictures, which coding systems to use, how to train coders, how to ensure high
interrater reliability, and much more. Her chapter features descriptive information about
the pull of a large array of frequently used pictures for the motivational needs for power,
achievement, and affiliation—information that will help make the compilation of suitable
picture sets for the assessment of a given motive or sets of motives less of an art and
more of an exact science. Pang also sketches out her own work on a new coding system
for n Achievement, which separates hope of success and fear of failure based on
sophisticated motivational arousal experiments.
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Brunstein and Schmitt (Chapter 6) present the exciting results of their efforts to
develop and validate an alternative approach to motive assessment based on the Implicit
Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), an approach that
promises a highly overdue extension of the measurement basis of implicit motives. As
they demonstrate in considerable detail, their IAT measure of n Achievement shows
convergent validity with a classic PSE measure of n Achievement, predicts the same
criterion (physiological indicators of effort investment of easy, medium, and difficult
tasks), and fails to overlap with self-report measures of achievement motivation.
Finally, Blankenship discusses the use of the computer in motivational theory and
assessment in Chapter 7. In the past, computers have been used for the development and
validation of a sophisticated theory of motivational processes, Atkinson and Birch‘s
(1970) dynamics of action theory, and Blankenship highlights the basic assumptions
behind this theory and its application in computer simulations that illustrate how stable
motives can give rise to variable behavior. She also discusses how the computer can be
used in the assessment of motives and in the analysis of thematic content in the stories
collected from research participants.
By being the longest of the book, the third section titled ―Basic Concepts and
Processes‖ reflects the fact that the field of implicit motive research has been
reinvigorated in recent years by a broad and rigorous exploration of the conceptual
foundations and implications of the implicit motive construct. In Chapter 8, Bender and
Woike summarize others‘ and their own impressive work on the effects of implicit
motives on memory processes. Motives enhance memory for events and episodes of daily
21
life, particularly when these episodes are affectively charged. Integrating motivational
and cognitive models of memory, Bender and Woike portray the effects of motives on
each stage of information processing contributing to this robust and pervasive effect.
In Chapter 9, Stanton, Hall, and Schultheiss discuss the nature of motive-specific
incentives, whose properties have not been identified and described satisfactorily for a
long time. They suggest that implicit motives respond preferentially to nonverbal
incentive stimuli and contrast this mode of functioning with explicit motives, which
respond primarily to verbal incentives. They also present a more specific model derived
from the nonverbal-processing hypothesis, motivational field theory, which holds that
nonverbal emotional signals of a sender serve as motivational incentives for the
perceiver, an effect that depends critically on the perceiver‘s implicit motives.
Hall, Stanton, and Schultheiss then descend into the biological basement of
motives in Chapter 10. As these authors point out, evidence for a strong and specific
biological basis for each of the major three implicit motives has been accumulating since
the 1960s, and this evidence may be among the strongest for the validity of the implicit
motive construct because it gets very close to the actual neurophysiological substrates of
motivation. Hall, Stanton, and Schultheiss provide a review of the older literature on the
biopsychology of motives and integrate it with more recent work on the behavioral
endocrinology of the big three motives. They also report findings from recent brain
imaging work on the role of the needs for power, affiliation, and achievement on brain
activation responses to facial expressions of emotion.
The next two chapters of this section deal with a fundamental and pervasive
finding in motive research and its implications: the statistical independence between
22
implicit motives and the motivational needs and strivings people ascribe to themselves on
questionnaires. Thrash, Cassidy, Maruskin, and Elliot (Chapter 11) provide a careful and
thought-stimulating analysis of the methodological and conceptual reasons for the low
overlap between implicit and explicit motives. They also discuss a variety of moderators
that influence the degree to which people‘s implicit motives and self-attributed needs
converge and that have emerged in research conducted over the past 10 years. In Chapter
12, Brunstein then discusses the consequences of the matches and mismatches between
implicit motives and explicit goal strivings for emotional well-being. His review of the
literature clearly shows that although implicit motives and explicit goals represent
independently operating systems for the regulation of behavior, they interact in shaping
feelings of elation and dejection that depend on the degree to which individuals succeed
or fail at motive-congruent goals. In tandem, the chapters by Thrash et al. and Brunstein
emphasize the validity of the basic assumption of implicit motive research—that people
generally do not have introspective access to their motivational needs—and demonstrate
how the concepts and methods developed by the field can be used for addressing one of
the fundamental issues of psychology since Freud, the independence of and dynamic
interactions between conscious and unconscious realms of the psychic apparatus.
Baumann, Kazén, and Kuhl (Chapter 13) present a principled conceptual account
of implicit motives from the perspective of personality systems interaction (PSI) theory.
PSI theory holds that affective and cognitive macrosystems interact in shaping people‘s
volitional, motivational, and self-regulatory adjustment to situational demands and
affordances. According to Baumann, Kazén, and Kuhl, implicit motives are rooted in one
of the cognitive macrosystems, extension memory, and moderate the interactions between
23
and typical configurations of affective and cognitive systems. PSI theory also yields a
new, more differentiated measurement approach for the assessment of each of the big
three motives, the Operant Motive Test, whose measurement credentials the authors
describe and discuss in this chapter.
The fourth and final section of the book deals with ―Interdisciplinary and Applied
Aspects‖ of implicit motives. Winter (Chapter 14) discusses the political and historical
correlates of implicit motives and provides a breathtaking vista of the findings he and his
collaborators have collected over the years. His research shows that the motivational
needs of political leaders predict their behavior in office and that the secret to belligerent
or peaceful resolutions of conflicts between countries is the degree to which the
communication between the parties involved reflects power-related or affiliative themes.
Here is hope that some fundamental laws driving the course of history can be identified
and measured empirically and that this knowledge may one day be used to predict and
prevent violent conflicts.
Since McClelland‘s (1961) seminal work on the cultural origins and correlates of
the achievement motive, one of the strengths of research of implicit motives has been its
focus on the cross-cultural commonalities of and differences between the eliciting
conditions and behavioral manifestations of motivational needs. Like few others in recent
years, Hofer has pushed the limits on the effects of culture on motives with his rigorous
and painstaking work on cultural influences on motives and their effects on well-being
and behavior in Germany, Costa Rica, Zimbabwe, and other countries. He provides an
overview of the key findings resulting from this impressive research program and
integrates them with earlier work in Chapter 15.
24
In contrast to the long tradition of cross-cultural work on motives, their role in
clinically relevant syndromes and disorders has received scarce attention in research. This
is particularly amazing in light of the fact that implicit motives play a critical role in
people‘s emotional well-being (see Chapter 12), and it therefore appears likely that they
also might influence the occurrence of mood disorders. Weinberger, Cotler, and Fishman
(Chapter 16) are the first to explore the role of implicit motives as vulnerabilities for and
protective factors against psychological problems. Their work on oneness motivation, a
member of the family of affiliative needs, indicates that this disposition is associated with
beneficial outcomes of psychotherapy and may promote mental health.
Boyatzis and Kelner, in Chapter 17, discuss the role of competencies, which are
rooted in, and are measured through similar content-coding procedures as, implicit
motives in business and management contexts. Competency assessment has been used
successfully to identify individuals who will show superior performance in specific jobs.
Boyatzis and Kelner provide an overview of the links between job competencies and
other measures of managerial success and job-related emotional intelligence.
Last but not least, Rheinberg and Engeser summarize their work on motivational
training of teachers, students, and their parents in Chapter 18. In groundbreaking studies
conducted over the past 30 years, Rheinberg has shown that motivational training can
help reduce fear of failure in the classroom and bolster hope of success through the
setting of individual norms instead of social norms. Rheinberg and Engeser also discuss
the issue of motivational competence, that is, individuals‘ ability to accurately perceive
the strength of their implicit motives and to set their goals accordingly. Many of
Rheinberg‘s findings are presented in English language here for the first time.
25
Science is a collaborative effort, and good scientific concepts need the nurture and
care of many brilliant and creative minds. This is also true for research on implicit
motives in general and the path that has led us to the conception and publication of this
volume in particular. We thank our excellent, knowledgeable contributors for bearing
with us through the various stages of this book. Without them and the work that they
present here the field would be in a state of intellectual anemia; thanks to them, it is
brimming with exciting new ideas, theories, and measures. Thanks to them, we have
every reason to hope for future growth and groundbreaking new insights in the field of
implicit motives!
We are grateful to our students who have, with their enthusiasm, curiosity, and
sharp minds, pushed us to go where in many instances we would not have gone on our
own, who have made the process of research and discovery exciting and addictive fun for
us, and who have shared the road with us on the way toward a better understanding of
motivational phenomena. At Friedrich-Alexander University (1989 until 2000), these
were Ruth Grässmann, Sven Hoyer, Harry Jankowski, Melitta Kosmann, Matthias Mehl,
Birgit Nawroth, Petra Rothe, and Udo Wolf (nee Lautenschlager). At the University of
Potsdam: Katharina Thiele, Anja Dargel, Cornelia Glaser, Jens Gebauer, and Norman
Geissler. At the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: Albert Bertram, Alexstine Davis,
Ben Dirlikov, Anja Fiedler, Jessica Hale, Julie Hall, Nicolette Jones, Casey Kley, Scott
Liening, Jeffrey MacInnes, Elizabeth Meier, Tiffiany Murray, Joyce Pang, Kathrin
Riebel, Ekjyot Saini, Daniel Schad, Steven Stanton, Cynthia Torges, Wendy Treynor,
Mark Villacorta, Kathryn Welsh, Alexi Wisher, Michelle Wirth, and Diana Yankova. At
26
the University of Giessen: Clemens Schmitt, Christian Schmirl, and Michael Förster. At
Friedrich-Alexander University (since 2007): Bettina Glaiber, Miriam Frisch, Martin
Köllner, Annette Kordik, Jennifer Kullmann, Alexandra Mader, Vilma Maksimovaite,
Mariya Patalakh, Maika Rawolle, Ramona Roch, Andreas Rösch, Anja Schiepe, Anne
Stab, and Stacie Stahnke.
We owe a particular debt to our mentors, colleagues, and collaborators, who
generously shared their time, resources, insights, and skills with us and without whom we
would not have prospered and grown as scientists in the way we did: Kent Berridge,
Stephanie Brown, Kenneth Campbell, Andy Elliot, Phoebe Ellsworth, Barb Fredrickson,
Rich Gonzalez, Dave McClelland, Heinz Heckhausen, Richard Hackmann, Günter Maier,
Erhard Olbrich, Patti Reuter-Lorenz, Wolfgang Rohde, Norbert Schwarz, Todd Thrash,
Brenda Volling, Christian Waugh, David Winter, and Carolyn Yoon.
A very special thanks to Heidi Reichmann and Judith Fisher for helping us with
finalizing the manuscript and getting it ready for submission and to Lori Handelman at
Oxford University Press for her patient and professional handling of the production of
this volume.
To our families, our partners, and our children: you have given us love and
support throughout the entire duration of this book project, despite the fact that because
of the book, we spent many evenings and weekends hunched over the computer instead
of with you. Thank you for your patience and understanding and for helping us balance
our lives when we lost sight of the fact that there is a world outside the word processor.
Erlangen and Giessen, April 2009
27
Oliver C. Schultheiss
Joachim C. Brunstein
28
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